It is movement within the church intent on purifying it from the worldliness of contemporary culture. Fallen through Adam and redeemed by Christ (spirit triumphing over flesh), humanity, they believe, must be converted from the passions of the body for the sake of a heavenly reward.
High standards of morality or outwardly visible prosperity in this life are signs that a person or community is favored by God and destined for the Kingdom of Heaven. The absolute authority for this is the Bible, rather than the established religious hierarchy of the official church and its officers. Each person has direct access to God through the Word, by means of which this movement aims to purify not only the church, congregation by congregation, but also all individual conduct and all the institutions of human society.
In such quests for purity, certainty, and exclusivity, there is no room for compromise. This at times leads to excesses of moral outrage that end in regrettable violence against those varying most from prevailing norms.
This, of course, is a portrayal not of the contemporary Religious Right but of 16th century Puritanism, which began in England. Later in New England — unlike other American Pilgrims who sought complete separation from the Church of England – the Puritans sought to stay inside the church while purifying or subverting its beliefs, forms of worship, and chosen leadership in the name of a higher morality.
The Puritans arrived in New England intent on establishing a religiously exclusive colony in which they were the majority and in which conformity to their beliefs was the enforced norm. Occasional excesses of violence, whether against native peoples or those accused of witchcraft, were only much later to be interpreted as inevitable outgrowths of the Puritans’ uncompromising quest for absolute purity, often expressed in the limited possibilities left for all others: convert, leave, or die. “Progressive Christians” today can thus be excused for our visceral uneasiness when modern Puritanism in the guise of the Religious Right again rears its head, dividing Church from Church, child from parent, neighbor from friend.
Although the Puritan Revolution, led by the “godly men” commanded by Oliver Cromwell, won the 17th century English Civil War, their victory turned out to be short-lived, lasting barely 12 years before the Restoration of the authority of the Church of England. So there is some precedent for simply trying to wait out such rigorist movements, hoping that in America as in England, though the modern day Puritans may have their day, in the end they will not prevail.
Yet — like women accused of witchcraft or indigenous peoples who welcomed the Puritan strangers to their shores only to have them turn on them with genocidal thoroughness — there are those in our own society who know that often by the time such tides finally turn, the damage can be beyond repenting. Gays and lesbians, liberals and democrats, Latinos and native peoples, all are left on Thanksgiving Day wondering whether this uniquely American celebration of our Puritan Pilgrim forebears is really for everyone after all, and what’s really Christian about it anyway.